If you want to measure your marketing activities then start using Google Analytics and setting up Goals for tracking conversions. Goals in Google Analytics allows you to see your conversion rates from your marketing efforts.

When you are running a number of different online promotions it makes sense to see which promotions are performing better by tracking conversion rates.

Never run open budget ads unless you can confirm the user takes the desired action your require and you clearly know the ROI of your ad spend. Once you have good tracking results then you can increase your ad spend on start split testing new ads.

In this video I’ll show you how it works and why you should be using Goals.

How To Setup Goal Conversions

What Actions Can Goals Track

As I explained in the video you might want to track where your email signups are coming from however you can also track other events like watching a video or even how much time a user spends on your site. You set what action is required for the Goal to be complete.

Here are some Goals we use on clients e-commerce sites:

Email signups

Product downloads

Contact form completions

Purchases

Conversion Goal Types

These are the types of Goals you can create:

URL Destination – When the user land on a specific page after an action is completed. This could be a product purchase confirmation page or an email signup thank you page.

Visit Duration – This conversion could be used to monitor how long a user is on the page. An example of its use could be to monitor a new traffic source. If a visitor stays on the page for more than X number of seconds/minutes your Goal is complete.

Pages Per Visitor Session – This conversion type allows you to track the number of pages great than, equal to or less than. A very useful tracking tool to see how loyal your visitors are based on what you are trying to track.

Events – This is one of the best Goal types allowing you to see which videos are viewed, what is downloaded even what buttons and links are clicked on your site. This is very powerful part of Analytics used along with with split testing.

Digging Deeper

You can obviously see the benefits of using Goal conversions when you start to seeing where your users come from, how much money they spend, who converted into leads and even what links they clicked on.

This data becomes a powerful part of your marketing tool box especially when you can adjust your online advertising budget to either convert more traffic into sales or gain more email signups. I found a great article here form Piwik which shows how to setup Goals in Analytics in more depth.

By setting up the Goals before I launched the site I’m now able to see which online ads and websites are sending traffic are converting into leads. This saves money on adverts that weren’t performing and generated more new leads by focusing on the higher converting ads.

Next time you run online ads make sure you have Goals setup in Analytics. It will do one of two things that all business owners like:

I'm David Frosdick, a content marketer & course creator. I spend my days working with OptimizePress, producing my own online courses and mostly seeing what's working online with marketing and selling products.